The Vietnam War’s Insider Threat

2,959 words

George Lepre
Fragging: Why US Soldiers Assaulted their Officers in Vietnam
Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2011

America’s first truly imperialist war, that against Spain in 1898, was waged by an army whose recruits were upper class, old-stock American men. The American soldier walking the point ahead of the rest of US Army towards the Spanish lines in Cuba was Sergeant Hamilton Fish, who came from a prominent family of New Yorkers who descended from Dutch-ruled New Amsterdam’s leader, Peter Stuyvesant. As a result of these top notch volunteers, The Spanish-American War and the two conflicts which immediately followed in China and the Philippines, were effectively waged and quickly won.

The Upper Class Avoids Vietnam

Six decades later, however, upper class, old-stock American men were not keen on fighting their generation’s war in Vietnam. One such upper-class American was James Fallows, who wrote,

Like many of my friends whose numbers had come up wrong in the lottery [i.e. with a draft number likely to end in induction into the service,] I set about securing my salvation. When I was not participating in anti-war rallies, I was poring over the Army’s code of physical regulations. During the winter and early spring, seminars were held in the college common rooms. There, sympathetic medical students helped us search for disqualifying conditions that we, in our many years of good health, might have overlooked. Although, on the doctors’ advice, I made a half-hearted try at fainting spells, my only real possibility was beating the height and weight regulations. My normal weight was close to the cut-off point for an “underweight” disqualification, and, with a diligence born of panic, I made sure I would have a margin.

After successfully getting a deferment, Fallows saw busloads of working-class young men arrived and the induction center. He went on to write,

These [busses] bore the boys from Chelsea, thick, dark-haired young men, the white proles of Boston. Most of them were younger than us, since they had just left high school, and it had clearly never occurred to them that there might be a way around the draft. They walked through the examination lines like so many cattle off to slaughter. I tried to avoid noticing, but the results were inescapable. While perhaps four out of five of my friends from Harvard were being deferred, just the opposite was happening to the Chelsea boys. We returned to Cambridge that afternoon, not in government buses but as free individuals, liberated and victorious. The talk was high-spirited, but there was something close to the surface that none of us wanted to mention. We knew now who would be killed.

Enter the Race Issue

Along with the working-class whites, the American military pulled in many blacks. The Vietnam War was the first conflict which took place after the illicit second constitution, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was made law, so the drafted blacks had a privileged position in US society throughout the conflict. Additionally, the military had desegregated in 1948.

According to the official narrative, there had never been a just reason for segregation in the first place. This, however, was not true. Black performance in the US military has always been uneven and there is a case to be made that past American military successes occurred despite the regiments of Colored troops rather than because of them.

Black troops have always carried with them the danger of violence and other trouble. Segregated all-black regiments went on rampages in Tampa in 1898, in Brownsville in 1906, and in Houston in 1917. In the Philippines in 1907, a black private murdered his commanding officer in the segregated 24th US Infantry. President Theodore Roosevelt approved the death penalty for the murderer. American politicians agonized about how to organize and train African Americans for World War I, and black performance during World War II included two poorly performing infantry divisions, an expensive all-Negro bomber wing that never got it together, and mutinies in rear areas. Otherwise, they labored in safe places far from the front lines.

Whites who’d served in segregated regiments as officers usually didn’t become sympathetic to integration later. Henry Fairfield Osborne Jr., the son of the famous scientist and eugenicist was a captain in a segregated field artillery regiment during World War I and he had more extreme pro-white beliefs than his father. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a black militant named Robert F. Williams encouraged blacks in the military to wage an insurrection. All these problems were known during the Vietnam War but nobody in a serious position in society could say this truth without running afoul of the vicious “Equal Opportunity” bureaucracy and the pro-integration media. Even conservatives of the day leaned towards pro-African and pro-integration ideas.

Blacks are a problem in the military for two basic reasons. The first is the narrative of slavery and alleged injustices suffered by them in America. By the late 1960s, the grievances arising out of this narrative had been carefully nursed by the American establishment. The blacks were therefore deliberately aggrieved and racial trouble was everywhere as a consequence. Then there is the difference in intelligence. Average black IQ is a standard deviation below that of whites. This leads to crime and poor outcomes across the board. In the US Army, the point where the IQ difference becomes noticeable is with a land navigation exercise called intersection and resection.

The Vietnam War is also notable in that the Johnson administration enacted a program called Project 100,000 which allowed low IQ people to enlist. There was a frequent cross over between non-whites and the men of Project 100,000, but the overlap was not entirely one-for-one. Those inducted under the auspices of Project 100,000 were known as McNamara’s Morons.

Fragging the Officers

The US Army’s rank system is organized in the following way: at the top are commissioned officers. They hold a commission from the president to carry out orders in his name. The lowest ranking commissioned officer holds a higher rank than the highest-ranking men of the other categories. Next are warrant officers. They hold a warrant from Congress to carry out a technical task. Most warrant officers are helicopter pilots. Then there are the enlisted men who comprise two parts. In the US Army, the junior enlisted men hold various levels of the rank of private with the top junior enlisted rank being Specialist. During the Vietnam War there were many grades of Specialist – a Specialist 5 was equal in rank to a sergeant but a man holding specialist rank had no authority to give commands while a sergeant could. A sergeant is part of the second level of enlisted ranks, The non-commissioned officers – NCOs. These men hold a rank in which their authority is derived from the commissioned officers, and they are part of the chain of command.

There has always been the threat of an officer of any of the three types described above being murdered by a man under his command, but such events are infrequent and an aberration. The Vietnam War is unusual in that these attacks, called fraggings, were part of a noticeable trend. That trend also had racial overtones. Blacks were overrepresented in this type of crime. Additionally, one in six of the fraggers was a Project 100,000 man.

The attacks were called fraggings because they usually involved a fragmentation grenade either thrown at or rigged to detonate near the sleeping quarters or office or vehicle used by the target. Another weapon was the claymore mine which creates a fragment laced blast like that of a shotgun. These explosives can easily be set to detonate, and it is difficult to prove who was behind an attack. Frequently, fraggings were assumed to be part of an attack on an American compound by the enemy, so evidence was lost in the ensuing call to arms. Fraggings didn’t occur in the front-line combat units which were carrying out a specific mission. They happened in rear areas, usually among the support troops or combat units billeted in a rear area.

Nixon’s Long Retreat

Richard Nixon won the election of 1968 by declaring that he would withdraw US troops from Vietnam. Unfortunately, this was difficult to do very quickly given the complexities of the time and place. As a result, soldiers deployed to Vietnam held the line in a war which was recognized by the American public as unnecessary. Meanwhile, the military, the Army in particular, was short at the mid-grade levels. Men who had a smattering of education and were twenty or so were sent to NCO school right after basic training and were made platoon sergeants. Normally a platoon sergeant would have a decade or more experience in uniform.

Young men with little life experience were thus leading other young men, which is extremely difficult. At the same time, a large portion of the soldiers were deliberately aggrieved blacks, McNamara’s Morons, or criminals inducted into the service instead of being sent to prison. Meanwhile, drugs, especially marijuana, had seeped into the service. Marijuana can make a user psychotic. On top of these problems, leftist agitators encouraged attacks against officers in so-called “underground” papers circulated throughout the rear areas in South Vietnam. The fraggings didn’t become a major problem until 1968. They increased in absolute numbers even as fewer and fewer soldiers served in Vietnam throughout the early 1970s.

The Leftist Narrative of Fraggings and the Truth

The narrative of fraggings follows this pattern:

An unpopular and aggressive officer, typically a Second Lieutenant with the personality of ROTC Cadet Commander Douglas C. Neidermeyer in the fictional film Animal House (1978), pushes around ordinary junior enlisted soldiers – often infantrymen – who were then called “grunts” with petty work details or endangers their lives with ill-advised and reckless combat actions. Then that officer is killed by several blacks acting out of the noblest reasons. The grunts supported the fragging to a man. Free of the troublesome officer, the grunts went on to projects like “winning the war” or “saving lives.”

This narrative turns out to be not true. The closest fragging to that of the leftist narrative involves the murder of First Lieutenant Robert Rohweller. He commanded a company of Marines and ordered that they conduct training maneuvers even in the rear. The order was unpopular, and a black named Reginald Smith killed him. The fragging demoralized the entire company, however. Despite the unpopularity of constant training, many of the enlisted men recognized its utility. Smith was convicted of the murder and continued to be a problem in prison. He was murdered by another inmate in 1982.

Most of the stories of fraggings which have made the rounds were cooked up by lairs. Lepre found such tales and compared them to unit histories, significant activity reports, and casualty lists and found that many of the fragging tales had gotten bigger with every telling.

Nonetheless there were many fraggings, between 600 and 900. The count is uncertain because the fragging as crime separate from murder or assault is difficult to truly categorize. Many fraggings were murders between men of equal rank involved in a private dispute and the killings involved something other than a fragmentation grenade or anti-personnel mine – knives, pistols, rifles, etc. In some cases, the fragging was accidental or so poorly carried out that the fragger was killed by the grenade he threw along with the others, so the event appeared like an accident.

Other times fraggings killed men who were not the intended target. Second Lieutenant Richard E. Harlan and First Lieutenant Thomas A. Dellwo were killed by a grenade thrown most likely thrown by a black man named Billy D. Smith. The two lieutenants were not the sub-Saharan’s targets, instead it was a captain and a first sergeant whom Smith disliked. Smith was court martialed for the fragging, but his case became a cause célèbre, even Burt Lancaster contributed to his defense, so he was acquitted.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise that blacks led the way in fraggings. Black soldiers had been a danger since 1898, but that was a time when white culture understood the danger and America’s whites had a political class who ensured they the tools to contain the problem, like segregation. By the late 1960s, the tools of containment were gone, and politicians drew heavily from the slop of the “civil rights” moral paradigm. Indeed, during the 1960s American blacks were encouraged to be as problematic and violent as possible. The call for black insurrection went unheeded during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it was amplified and embraced by 1968. Lepre writes,

Racially motivated violence in Vietnam eventually became so widespread that it evolved from surreptitious fragging-type offenses to open hostility. Such sentiment was actively encouraged by radicals at home, who exhorted blacks in Vietnam to commit violent acts against the predominantly white command structure. In his article “To My Black Brothers in Vietnam,” Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver wrote, “You need to start killing the racist pigs who are over there with you giving you orders. Kill General Abrams and his staff, all his officers. Sabotage supplies and equipment, or turn them over to the Vietnamese people” (pp. 106-7)

On Camp Radcliff in 1971, Captain Willim Reichert found that he was forced to deal with a collection of Black Power militants. He was even attacked when confronting the militants for refusing to work. He informed his commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Mason, but Reichert was given no support. Both Reichert and First Sergeant James M Emerich wrote sealed letters to be open in the case of their deaths which described the problem and named the sub-Saharan militants. Richert was shot and killed by several blacks after they believed their platoon would deploy to a forward area.

Reichart’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Mason, was blamed for keeping Reichert from transferring the problem blacks out of his company in the resulting report, but in Mason’s defense, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the EO Bureaucracy, and the integrationists had set up an overarching cultural structure that automatically made any white leader the culprit in racial problems such as those facing Captain Reichart. Had Lieutenant Colonel Mason transferred the militants, they’d have joined another knot of sub-Saharan subversives somewhere else. Vietnam proved the necessity of segregation.

The leftist narrative that the fragging victims were carrying out petty actions designed to humiliate, or insult is also not true. Most of the victims were sergeants or commissioned officers seeking to end drug use, awaken a sleeping guard, or distributing cigarette rations by regulation.

Ending Fragging

Fragging spread across the military outside of South Vietnam, mostly driven by junior enlisted blacks. Eventually, two men brought the crisis to the public. The first was Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana. The second was a recently discharged Sergeant named Stephen S. Canaday. Canady wrote to his division commander a clear letter describing the problem. The division commander ordered the provost marshal to investigate the matter. He did, and his report started a chain reaction.

To end the scourge, the military ceased issuing grenades for the defense of rear areas and ordered that all grenades be accounted for. Should there be a fragging, the command would call the Military Police, cordon off the area, allow for a thorough inspection, and arrest the suspect(s) immediately. Trials for alleged fraggers would be carried out quickly. Additionally, internal security measures would be added to every rear area base – such as fences around the NCO’s quarters. Despite the actions the scourge didn’t cease until the Vietnam War ended.

Fragging & Continued Racial Conflict

The late Vincent Okamoto a Japanese man with US Citizenship who served in Vietnam was interviewed in the 2017 Ken Burns Vietnam War documentary. He described fraggings along the same lines as the leftist narrative described above. In the film he had to suppress a laugh when describing one fragging of a white officer initiated by blacks that he claimed to have seen. While not all fragging incidents were racial, many were, and establishment-encouraged black resentment was the engine of the social contagion.

The idea of fragging continues on in the culture of the service. The buffoonish Russell Honoré, a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion general who figureheaded an army supply and support convoy to save helpless blacks during Hurricane Katrina, hinted at fragging in a tweet directed at Trump’s Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warning that Hegseth might, “…quickly loose favor w the Grunts..” (sic) The use of the Vietnam Era term “grunts” can be taken as a call for a fragging, although significantly veiled.

Actual fraggings have occurred since the Vietnam War. During the Persian Gulf War, John Allen Muhammad, a sub-Saharan radical who would become one of the DC Snipers is the most likely suspect in a fragging case where a thermite grenade was thrown into a tent of sleeping soldiers in Saudi Arabia. Another fragging happened when Hasan Karim Akbar a sub-Saharan convert to Islam assigned to the 101st Airborne Division threw a grenade into a tent at the beginning of the Iraq War. In 2009, a Moslem who’d foolishly been given a commission as a major went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.

Then there is the sub-lethal insubordination that is endemic in the military, although not fragging in the strictest sense, it along with items like critical race theory are normalized and professionalized repackaging of the racial agitation which drove the fragging phenomenon during the Vietnam War. Morally and philosophically this new situation is worse. The fraggers in Vietnam tended to have criminal backgrounds, slapdash and chaotic upbringings, and unresolved issues and they joined in a demoralized army deployed to a place where drugs were easy to acquire. Nearly all the fraggers were high or drunk during their attack. The more recent fraggings were carried out by coolheaded men with a distinct political agenda and this agenda has the sympathy of most of the American establishment.